It’s been quite a while since I’ve hopped on my own blog site. China turned into Hong Kong and Hong Kong turned into LA and LA turned into Boston within two winks. That’s how fast it all came and went. I look back on the year and think, “Man, that was the longest year of my life,” but then I think, “Whoa, where’d that year go?”
Since being home most everyone has been wondering about China. So here’s the synopsis (sorry for the non detail and vague pictures, but it’s to protect the long term workers in China… I don’t really want to screw up their ministry).
We started in Central China (somewhere with a Chinese name) to do a cultural exchange at an area college. We learned about Chinese culture in the morning and in the afternoon offered our services as English speakers to the English majors (to practice theirs on us). We learned how to do Chinese calligraphy (I stunk at it, so i ended up just drawing pictures of my dog… who was really happy to see us, by the way), paper cutting, embroidery, Mandarin lessons (I used some of it on the guy at the Chinese food restaurant in our home town when he handed us our take out chicken wings. He was so excited that he kept talking, then I had to tell him I didn’t understand him… I had exhausted all my Mandarin.), and tea ceremonies.
From there we made friends and ate in the cafeteria A LOT, as it was the cheapest dining around. Some people had the opportunity to share Jesus with some of the students, but we had to be very careful in this setting as there are many monitors (we call them snitches) which are highly regarded positions in the college.
After two weeks there, our team (O’Phun, minus Josh), prepared for a strenous hiking trip to area villages. It’s uncommon to be able to sleep in villagers homes (as the government forbids it), except for where there are no hotels. So we lightened our load by handing off a duffle bag full of stuff to team Salt (THANKS AGAIN!!) and psyched ourselves up for the long ten days. We knew we’d be sweaty and stinky without a shower, and so these were things we accepted, and prepared for (yay baby wipes!)
We lost Lynette to a family visit in Tokyo (she would have been miserable hiking with her bug net and all of the extra gadgets she had to ward off bugs). So we were down to 6. But then we added a guy who came straight from the States. He’d heard about this opportunity to go into the boonies of China but didn’t have anyone to go with, so this was his chance.
Turns out, this 24 year old guy was a pastor, and was a total extrovert, and had prepared to evangelize China. Our leader came in the night before we left and debriefed us… we were going to pray in the villages. We wouldn’t really be able to communicate with the people as they spoke a different language from Mandarin. And the girl going with us didn’t speak much english either in order to translate for us. Hmm… and to top it off, our little guide didn’t like to hike. So all the mental preparation spent on the hike, fell by the wayside as we hopped into a bus to get to our first village. We visited schools and prayed. That’s what we did.
As we know, prayer changes things in the heavenlies, and we felt the Holy Spirit in these places where we couldn’t share Him verbally. We bussed to the next location, and then “hiked” (walked down the road) to the third stop, where we did home visits. We began singing praise songs in one woman’s home, and she began to cry, not because she knew the words, but because of the presence of God. At our final stop (which we bussed to as well), we visited school and did some prayer walking.
It was truly a good foot to end the race on. All year we’d had the opportunity to speak with people, evangelize, read scripture with them, but here we were left with none of those devices. Our goal: pray. Pray for the villagers, for the school children, for China. Break stuff over this nation. China has a very strong spiritual air to it. Between ancestral worship and the one child policy(forced tubal ligations, abortions, murder of newborns), there is a huge spirit of death, and meaningless of human life over China. These people need to know their true identity in order to give their lives meaning. Foreigners who come in to just hug, and visit for a couple of days do a major work. Their presence alone in these remote areas shows the locals how much their Savior cares for them (even if they don’t know Him yet). It sounds like we didn’t do much, but I disagree. I think we did a work that we may never see the ROI (return on investment) on, but someone else will. Please pray for the long term workers over in China… they are the ones that are reaping the harvest!
So, without the hiking we ended up with a little more down time on our hands. Time that we spent sharing with our new team member. We didn’t always see eye to eye on some issues, but I realized how much i’ve changed over the year. I used to be so quick to let people know that i was right and they were wrong. I used to decide not to like someone if they disagreed with my point of view, or were very vocal about their view. I used to choose to be right over choosing to love. So I didn’t have to win arguements, and we could agree to disagree (also things I was able to do with team O’Phun). Grace… Those who have been forgiven much, forgive. O’Phun spent hours around fires and lazy susans debriefing our year. And we realized how much we were going to miss fires and lazy susans to talk around. (sniff, sniff).
At the end of ministry our team flew up to Beijing for a little tourist fun! The Summer Palace, Tienamen Square, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall. (BTW… if you ever want to visit, prepare yourself for the spitting, the dirt, babies pooping on the streets, and vendors charging 80% more than the actual value of items).
So, there’s the synopsis of China. I’ll make sure to write about debrief in Hong Kong, and life in Boston (or as we like to say Baastan). Oh, and we told the college students that we can’t get into Haavad (Harvard to the non-Bostonian) because all the Chinese are there. :)…. (remember, be unoffendable!)
